Painting

Pigment laid on a surface with brush, knife or hand, one of the oldest and most widespread ways people have made images.

2,130 works · 10 related artists

About

Painting is older than writing. Hand stencils in red pigment on cave walls in Sulawesi and Spain are tens of thousands of years old, and every later culture found its own supports and binders: lime plaster for fresco, silk and paper for Chinese ink painting, egg on wooden panels for Byzantine icons, bark and ochre in Aboriginal Australia, oil on canvas across Europe from the 16th century.

What painting is for has kept changing. Renaissance artists used perspective and modelling to make a flat surface read as a view into space, while Chinese scholar-painters prized the living trace of the brush above likeness. In the 19th century Claude Monet and the Impressionists made perception itself their subject; in the 20th, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock gave up recognisable subjects altogether. Since photography arrived, painting has been declared finished many times, and it has outlasted each announcement.